Lustron

Dani parked her old Mustang under the big oak on Prairie Avenue and after checking the traffic—there wasn’t any because it was late—stepped out onto the street and shut the door behind her, taking care to not slam it too hard. It was spooky quiet out here, but Leo had asked her to meet him out here, so she had come.

She walked across the street to the old gas station where he had told her to meet him, her shoes crunching on the loose stones on the asphalt. She stepped into a pothole and almost twisted her ankle and muttered, “Shit,” but she was okay and continued over to the station. A dog howled in the distance and it sent shivers down her spine. Why the hell had he asked her to meet him out here? Couldn’t he have just come to her place?

As she got closer to the station, she looked up. The moon was full and shone down on the building, and the security light lent a green glow to the structure. It had a weird metal siding on it and she wondered why people had ever made buildings out of this metal. It seemed to her that it would be really cold in the winter and stiflingly hot in the summer. She had lived in a mobile home for a while and it was like that. But when she looked at the building, she had to admit that it looked pretty cool. The metal seemed to glow under the moon and the greenish tint of the fluorescent security light.

She walked up to the side of the building and wondered what the graffiti scrawled across the metal tiles meant. Before she could think about it too much, she heard a low whistle from behind the garage. She walked over to the corner and peeked around without saying anything. She heard another whistle and then a whisper. She stayed silent and then she heard her name.

“Dani. It’s me.”

She breathed a sigh of relief. She walked around the corner towards the voice. “Leo! What are you doing?” She kept her voice quiet because of how silent the street was, but she wanted to laugh. “You scared me!”

She got closer to him and then he stopped her with a harsh, “No!”

She stopped in her tracks. He was huddled against the building, slumped down in the fallen leaves, in the shadows. “Leo? What is it?”

“Stop. Don’t come any closer.”

“Well, if you didn’t want me to come out here to be with you, why the hell did you call me? And for that matter, why the hell didn’t you just ask if you could come over to my place? It’s not like you’ve never been over there before and it’s not like I haven’t told you that you’re welcome to come over and—”

“Dani,” Leo whispered. “For fuck’s sake. Shut up.”

“Leo, you do not get to tell me to shut up. I came out here to this creepy-ass old gas station at one o’clock in the morning because I thought you might be in trouble and it really is creepy as hell out here and you do NOT get to tell me to shut up!”

She thought she heard him chuckle. “Are you laughing at me, Leo? You had better not be laughing at me!”

Then what she thought was a chuckle turned into a horrible gurgling sound.

“Leo! Are you okay? You sound like you’re choking!” She started towards him and he stopped her with a loud moan. “Leo. You do not sound like you’re okay.”

He coughed and it sounded kind of...clogged. “I’m not okay. I got bit, Dani.”

“Bit? By what? A bat? A raccoon or something?”

He laughed quietly, but it turned into another coughing fit. “No. Not either of those.”

“It was that dog I heard howling down the street, wasn’t it? I bet it’s rabid! It was fucking Cujo, wasn’t it? We have to get you to the hospital!” She stepped towards him again.

“Dani. No.” She could barely see his hand raised to stop her, and then he pointed towards the garbage bag a few feet from him. “There. That’s what it was.”

She stepped over to the garbage bag, broken glass crunching under her shoes. She was glad she hadn’t worn sandals. She toed the garbage bag and it shifted, rolling towards her. It wasn’t a bag of garbage. A human face stared up at her, grey and pockmarked, Leo’s pocket knife stuck in its eye.

She sighed. “Ahhh, goddammit, Leo.” She looked over at him.

He nodded. “I know.”

“You knew they were heading this way. Why weren’t you more careful?”

“Do we really need to have this discussion now, Dani?”

“No. I suppose we don’t. It’s a done deal, isn’t it?”

She saw him nod and then the clouds cleared and the moon shone brightly on Leo’s face. It was as grey as the “garbage bag” a few feet from him.

“Leo. I’m so sorry.”

“I know. Me, too.”

She pulled the pocket knife out of the garbage bag’s eye and stepped closer to Leo.

“Dani, stop.”

“No. I have to.” She took his hand and kissed it. “We had some good times.”

“We did. You know what you need to do now.” His voice had become more guttural. “You know the plan. You have the supplies.”

“Yes. I’ll do what I need to do. Good night, Leo.”

He nodded. “Good night, Dani.” He kissed her hand and she tried to ignore how slobbery his kiss was.

She did what she needed to do. She walked around the front of the gas station and looked up at the green glow of the corner of the metal building. She walked rapidly back to her Mustang and headed back to her place.

It was a whole new world.

Beth’s Books: The Walking Dead Psychology

(Subtitled Psych of the Living Dead, edited by Travis Langley)

It’s been a while since I wrote about The Walking Dead, and with the midseason finale of Season 6 coming up, this seems like a good time!

Besides, I absolutely loved this book. It takes a serious look at the psychological aspects of the show, both why viewers watch and the toll the Zombie Apocalypse (or any other type of apocalypse) takes on survivors and affects their behaviors. Psychology has always been a casual hobby of mine, and of course, I am truly obsessed with the show, so this was right up my alley. The book is a collaborative effort of several Psychology professors and counselors, and they all offer interesting insights on varying aspects of the show.

So why do we watch? One of the authors posits that it is because we have a longing for a sense of community, deeper relationships, and connections. There are no cell phones or computers in the ZA. No television, no Internet, and none of the constant bombardment of stimuli that we are subjected to on a daily basis. The survivors have to rely on each other for everything and deep relationships are formed. When you place your life into the hands of others on a daily basis, forging such strong bonds is a major contribution to your survival.

There is also a strong sense of nostalgia for things lost. The survivors feel it as they make their way through the wasted land filled only with walkers; something as simple as the ice cubes in Andrea’s glass of lemonade at Woodbury are seen as a long-lost luxury. After Rick and Carl flee the prison and find refuge in an empty home, Carl looks at the video games in a kid’s room and the big screen TV with longing...then rips the cord off of the useless TV to use to secure the front door. The viewers feel it, too. Seeing abandoned homes and signs of the people who lived there, seeing rusted cars grown over with kudzu, seeing a world that has ended for the vast majority of human beings...how can you not feel a sense of longing for what has been lost? The premiere episode of the show is called “Days Gone Bye” for a good reason.

Another author believes that part of the show’s appeal to so many of us is that it causes us to reflect on existential questions such as the meaning of our lives and to what purpose we would continue in such a scenario. It may cause us to confront our fears and think about how we would react in the ZA. Would we retain our humanity? Would we grow hungry with power like the Governor, or would we do whatever it takes to protect our family, like Rick is trying (and not always succeeding) to do? The author draws an analogy between survival in the ZA and survival in the death camps of the Holocaust. It’s not a bad analogy because surviving both would take courage and the ability to confront the worst that humanity has to offer. How can anyone deal with such inhumanity (in the ZA, both from the walkers and from certain other survivors) and come through unscathed? It’s natural to question our own abilities to deal with such extreme circumstances.

As for the survivors’ response, they are all suffering in varying degrees from Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder. They have all seen and done some incredibly horrible and brutal things and are under constant stress and constant fear. All of this can result in unpredictable behavior and bad decision-making, both of which can cost you your life or the lives of those who are looking to you for protection, resulting in further stress and survivor’s guilt. Many of the survivors have experienced psychotic breaks, such as Morgan after losing his son Duane, or Rick after Lori died. Michonne spent months by herself, talking to her dead boyfriend as if he were there. One of the big questions in the series has been, “Do you get to come back?” In other words, after all you’ve seen and done, do you get to survive with your humanity intact? It’s a question that is still being answered for many of our survivors.

The most interesting chapter to me was the one that considered Daryl Dixon’s transformation from angry redneck to reliable soldier, and even to transformative hero. The author looks at Daryl in the context of Joseph Campbell’s ‘hero arc,’ in which the character embarks on a journey of self-discovery. Daryl is compared to the classical hero Ulysses, who experiences hardships and tests in his travels and learns much about himself in the process. Daryl was an abused child, growing up in sad circumstances; he looks for Sophia with such dedication because he thinks about how he wished he could have been saved when he was a child. It has taken the ZA to make Daryl realize his potential as a human being with meaning to his life, and a valuable, trusted member of the group. As such, Daryl is a symbol of much-needed hope in the apocalyptic world. If Daryl can overcome what he did and grow into a position of trust and leadership, then there is hope for all of us. Daryl sets the bar high and challenges us to become our own “better angels.”

The book also does a few case studies of some of the characters to see if they fit the profile of a psychopath. Shane, the Governor, the Claimers, Negan, and others are examined using professional criteria.

The book concludes with the thought that zombies help us confront one of our biggest fears: our own mortality. We see that the zombies are simply bags of meat, without purpose or meaning other than finding their next meal (and hopefully it’s not us). We all have a desire to find meaning in our lives, to be more than another bag of meat. The book feels that The Walking Dead succeeds in showing the human struggle to find meaning in life, even knowing that our mortality is inevitable, and that our struggle matters.

So why do I love the show so much? Because it makes me think about all these things. Yes, you can say that it is “just a TV show,” but I’ve always felt that good TV can speak to us on a level that makes us address certain things in ourselves and also connects us with others who feel the same way. The best shows make you wonder how you would react in certain situations, whether it’s Walter White confronting a cancer diagnosis or Don Draper dealing with his past and the rapidly changing world around him. The Walking Dead makes us wonder what we would do in order to survive...or would we even want to? And why?

Highly recommended for anyone who is a fan of the show, comics, or novels.

Dead and Loving It

Sunday was a pretty happy day for me because it was a Dead day!

I think my obsession with love of “The Walking Dead” has been well-established here and on social media. I get into it like no other show I’ve watched before, and I’ve gotten into quite a few shows over the years.

The Season 5 marathon started early in the morning and I turned it on after I’d gotten up. We had it on all day in the background. (I didn’t sit and watch because I knew the DVD would be here today and we’ll watch the whole thing in depth over the next few weeks.) At 8 PM, it was a new “Talking Dead” episode with a Season 6 preview, and I have really missed Chris Hardwick and that show, too!

Then at 9 PM, it was the 90-minute preview of the new companion series, “Fear the Walking Dead.” If you’ve been under a rock or care nothing about this kind of show, this series takes place before the events we saw in the premiere of “The Walking Dead.” It also takes place in a very different environment: Los Angeles. Instead of the rural survival skills we see in the original series, we will get to see some urban survival skills!

I was impressed by the tone of this first episode. It had a slower pace than we’re used to on the original, but that stands to reason. These people are just going about their lives and have no idea what is happening. They just know that something is starting to seem rather odd in their city.

The standout to me was the character of Nick Clark, played by British actor Frank Dillane. I liked him immediately, and he portrays this junkie kid perfectly. He is a strange mixture of vulnerability, affability, and total fuck-up. He’s needy and emotionally damaged, but he somehow makes you root for him despite all that. He’s the only one in the family (at least initially) who witnesses a zombie chowing down firsthand (the zombie is his girlfriend, no less), but no one believes him because he’s a junkie. He doesn’t even believe himself and thinks that there was something in his drugs that gave him a horrible hallucination.

Although I’m not as emotionally invested in these characters as I am in those of the original series (yet), I thought that this was a strong start, and these are strong characters who are going to make this a great show. They got the tone exactly right. This would be an unbelievable situation and not everyone is going to be equipped to process it and adapt to this new world.

It seems as though there were quite a few others who were as excited about this show as I was. “Fear the Walking Dead” was the highest-rated series premiere on cable in history.

Beth’s Books: We’re All Infected

Every week or so, I browse our most excellent local library’s website for new ebooks to borrow. I really am trying to do better about borrowing books rather than buying them, and although success in that regard has been limited, I am trying, I swear! I got a pleasant surprise when I saw this book, We’re All Infected: Essays on AMC's The Walking Dead and the Fate of the Human, edited by Dawn Keetley.

You all know how much I love the show, so this was right up my alley! I put a hold on it and got the notification a couple of days later that it was available. (Seriously...what a great feature of most libraries now!) 

Some might see the show and the zombie genre as mere pop culture fluff, but I’ve always felt that there was more to it than that. This collection of essays takes a scholarly look at zombies and the show in particular, looking at various sociological, psychological, and anthropological aspects. These aspects include the impact of violence and death, America’s cowboy mentality (Rick is basically a Western hero, isn’t he?), law enforcement, mourning or lack thereof, reliance on fossil fuels, the importance of language and communication (zombies can’t communicate beyond inarticulate growls), and a biomedical discussion of zombie function and breakdown.

There is a bit of history of zombies in pop culture, and that is fascinating in its own right. When zombies were first introduced to the U.S., it was as the Haitian voodoo zombies, and their portrayal in ‘30s and ‘40s-era movies was as a shambling slave under someone else’s control. Movies like “White Zombie” and “I Walked With A Zombie” reflected a fear of becoming a zombie and the loss of autonomy.

George Romero changed things in 1968 with “Night of the Living Dead,” with the zombies becoming something to fear, not just to fear becoming. This was seen as a metaphor for an increasingly violent world, and the zombie outbreak was said to be the result of some sort of massive radiation event, reflecting the fear of the Cold War. The zombies were still slow and shuffling, but overwhelming in their numbers.

This changed again in 2002 with “28 Days Later,” a movie in which the outbreak is a result of some type of viral infection. The outbreak moves quickly, and so do these zombies. This possibly reflects a fear of pandemics and terrorists, or a world moving rapidly out of control.

One of the most interesting essays to me was the one that focused on the question of time and the loss of it. The author of this essay, Gwyneth Peaty, showed how the show focuses on the lack of time. There is never enough time to mourn the dead, to process what is happening, to take a breath and focus on something other than mere survival. The one time everyone seems to relax a bit around the campfire while eating fish that Andrea and her sister Amy caught that afternoon, they all have a few laughs as Dale explains why he continues to wind his watch every day. This moment of relaxation and light-hearted camaraderie is taken away from the survivors—and from us—as the camp is attacked by zombies, and several people are brutally killed, including Amy. Andrea keeps vigil over her sister’s corpse, waiting for it to reanimate, and tells her she thought there would always be more time. Even at the end of Season 4, Hershel’s watch is still making an appearance and playing a big part. Time is important.

The zombies themselves are a constant reminder to the survivors that time is short and that humanity is lost. We mark our own mortality by the passage of time, with the inevitable outcome of death. We (hopefully) make the best of the time we have been granted. The reanimation of dead human beings into walking, cannibalistic zombies takes that outcome away from us. The zombies “live” in suspended time and take away our future. Without the prospect of a future, there is little hope to be found.

It’s a lot of fun to speculate and discuss what zombies say about our current state of mind as a society, but Romero himself is quick to point out that sometimes a zombie is just a zombie (paraphrased). He has said, “The zombies have always just been zombies...my stories are about humans and how they react, or fail to react...I’m pointing the finger at us, not at the zombies.”

I think this is an important thing to note in the context of “The Walking Dead.” I often see people freaking out online because the writers are focusing more on the people than on the zombies. Some people complain that there aren’t enough zombie kills, too much dialogue, and too much focus on the human survivors. It seems to me that they are missing the entire point of the show (and the graphic novels), as well as Romero’s point about his own groundbreaking movies.

In the TV show, it’s not really the walkers who are the walking dead...it is the human survivors. The show is ultimately about the breakdown of society and how those who remain deal with it: can they manage to form a new society? How? If so, what form will it take? Will they be able to keep their own sense of humanity? When the world goes to shit and almost everybody gets bit (from a scene with Daryl and Andrea), what will our individual and group reaction be? How will we deal with not just the zombies, but with the sometimes more dangerous human survivors?

These are fascinating questions to me, and it’s why I love the show so much. This book got a little bogged down in psychobabble in a few places (it’s okay to use regular words, folks...not everything needs to be couched in psychological terms), but I found it very thought-provoking, and it gave me some insights into the show that I had not thought of before. Because of these essays, I will watch it with a newly discerning eye when it returns in the fall.

Is it October yet?!

Beth’s Books: World War Z

Yes, I’m late to the game on this one. Shame on me!

I was grabbed by this one immediately, and it is an instant personal favorite. I’ve always had a thing for zombies, whether it was the granddaddy of them all, “Night of the Living Dead,” the technicolor horror of “Dawn of the Dead,” or the laugh-out-loud camp of “Return of the Living Dead.” Now zombies have invaded our television broadcasts, and some of you may have heard that I kind of like that show “The Walking Dead.” (Just a little bit!)

One of the things I love about TWD is that it seriously considers what would happen to society and to human interaction in such an apocalyptic event. World War Z goes into depth on this aspect of it. If you take the time to think about it, it would be devastating to our society and to our social mores. This book addresses topics such as the breakdown of government, conditional ethics, mental health, and cannibalism.

It also addresses the logistics of killing zombies, the changing tactics of a military combating them, and one of the creepiest things for me, underwater zombies. Gahhh!

I loved the documentary style of the book, with the narrator interviewing people all over the world and getting their perspective on the plague and subsequent war. Soldiers, survivors, politicians, religious figures...all have their own experiences and thoughts.

I should probably point out here (although my fellow zombie aficionados already know this) that the zombie apocalypse is a metaphor for what might happen in some other sort of global apocalypse. Perhaps a nuclear war, or a lethal global pandemic. When it comes to apocalyptic events, a zombie infestation is pretty low on the probability scale.

Devastating climate change, a massive asteroid, a pandemic virus that kills lots of people without reanimating them...all more realistic than a zombie virus. But it serves to address our darkest fears of such an event. We are able to focus on fictitious threats easier than we are able to focus on realistic ones.

But deep-down, we know that we really are afraid of a devastating event. Our preoccupation with a zombie apocalypse is simply whistling past the graveyard as we make our way towards oblivion and maybe even obsolescence as a species.

On that uplifting note, here is an equally uplifting song from the Walking Dead soundtrack. This is a seriously cool and menacing song called “You Are The Wilderness” by Voxhaul Broadcast. There’s a wolf in my heart for you....